Read Online The Dead Boy by Craig Saunders - Free Book Online

headlights and the tail lights of the buses ahead, both shining on
the wet road, bouncing back from cat's eyes. She was tired from driving and the
light was hurting her eyes, sore anyway from the strain of peering into the
darkness, from the light of the buses, back to the road, to the light...
                The
country road wound and twisted and turned and was hard to navigate. The buses
ahead were easy enough to follow, though.
                Because
they're fucking buses , she thought.
                The
further they travelled, the surer she became that her husband and son were in
danger. Why would the army drive innocent people out into the wilds for over an
hour? If her assumption was even near the mark, they might even be sick.
                Dying,
though?
                It
didn't make any kind of sense.
                She
rubbed at her eyes for a moment, and when she looked ahead again, the lead bus'
brake lights glowed. The following buses slowed for something Eleanor couldn't
see. They didn't stop, but turned.
                She
came this far. She could only follow.
                Where
the three buses left the road was a long fence, and a gate. It lead through
some trees and out onto a small track surrounded by low shrubs.
                Signs
hung along the fence, each proclaiming the same owner: Ministry of Defence.
                It
was a simple choice, right then. Her husband and her son might be on one of
those buses and they were the only two people in the world that made her better
than she was.
                No
choice at all.
                Eleanor
switched off her lights and coasted through the gate. She used the ruts in the
road as a guide, until she saw the buses ahead, lights off, just looming hulks
of metal and glass in a wide expanse of nothing.
                'What
in the fuck is going on?' she whispered.
                Only
when she cut the engine did she hear them yelling. Distressed, or scared, and
probably angry, too. Taken from a normal day, thinking about family, and
chores, and the evening's television. Taken away from dinner or bedtime, or
dates, or parents. Then they'd been driven to the middle of nowhere and left in
the dark.
                George.
David.
                If
they were in there, she had to do something. Even if they weren't...those people...
                For
a moment, she recognised she was about to try to interfere with the army - men with guns, and the law, and power...
                But
only for a moment.  
                She
had her right foot out of the car when a line of fire lit up the sky and the
lead bus exploded.
                'Oh...God...'
                Fire
trailed from the sky twice more. A forth bomb struck a beat later - this one
spread a wall of fire over the wrecked buses, engulfing everything in some kind
of chemical that turned the twisted buses and the fields around into bright
blue fire.
                There
could be no people after that...only fire.  
                'My
baby. My baby ...no...please.'
                Eleanor
slumped back into her seat.
                No
accident.
                Even
through the horror, and her sorrow, she understood she'd just witnessed fighter
jets raining fire down on three civilian buses full of innocent people. A cold,
heartless murder.
                And
one that left nothing behind at all.
                Fragmented
images ran through her mind. Skeletons, their limbs curled inward. Tortured metal
after plane crashes. Body parts sent home when the remains were not whole. War
graves, with bodies forgotten in vast pits.
                She
closed the car door. In shock, unable to look away from the flames, Eleanor
didn't realise a car pulled in behind her